Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—Horace Mollycoddle, political
pseudoscientist at the Machiavelli Institute, has theorized in his interview
with Subversion Magazine, that being morally right on the political issues is
correlated with being a wimp or a sissy, which is why politicians who need to
best each other in the bloodsport of politics either can’t justify their
policies or are unwilling to fight for what’s right.

Quoting Yeats, Mollycoddle said, “The best lack all
conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Liberalism is more rational and ethical than conservatism,
according to Mollycoddle, and liberalism entails assigning equal rights to
women and minorities “whose feminine interests and slave morality rub off on
liberal men, draining liberals in general of the strength to wage war on the
manifest villainy of so-called conservatives.”

Thus, in the United States, Republicans trounce Democrats
and “push their odious ‘free-market’ policies of plutocracy and their
anachronistic and incoherent family values to evermore insane extremes. Alternatively,
liberals somehow scrape together a victory, but lack the stomach to apply their
progressive principles, as in the case of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.” Mollycoddle
added that Hillary Clinton would likewise have governed as a neoliberal
centrist, had she defeated Donald Trump in 2016.

Mollycoddle therefore posits a Wuss Factor that renders
liberals “girly-men,” as Arnold Schwarzenegger called them. “This is the
flip-side of Obama’s famous lack of ‘drama’: he didn’t create any drama while
in office only because he didn’t care about anything, which is why, in turn, he
didn’t fight for anything.

Obama’s defenders have said he’s cerebral rather than
spineless or nihilistic, but Mollycoddle contends that “intellectualism, as in
Woody Allen’s perennial movie character or Dostoevsky’s ‘mouse’ in Notes from the Underground, can provide
cover for cowardice.” Instead of admitting to “a lack of the irrational inner strength
that’s often needed to take decisive action, the hyper-aware intellectual will
rationalize in an endless cycle of doubts and half-measures.”

Obama didn’t fight for a public option in the healthcare
debate, said Mollycoddle, and so he will “suffer the irony that ‘Obamacare’ may
be repealed even though Obama’s Affordable Care Act wasn’t at all a progressive
alternative but was a conservative, Romney-style non-solution to the problems
with the American healthcare system. And when he discovered that Vladimir Putin
was waging cyberwar against the US in its 2016 presidential election, Obama
dithered and choked instead of punishing Russia.

“Ultimately,” Mollycoddle continued, “this is because it’s
impossible to be both moral and manly. To be sure, the liberal’s heart will
always be in the right place. Unfortunately, this means Obama, Bernie Sanders,
Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter, or any other liberal leader
necessarily lacks the killer instinct to destroy his or her enemies.”

Ordinarily, in a healthy democracy, politicians would have
“no need for battlefield virtues, no need to attempt to systematically annihilate
their rivals,” because both sides would have the common welfare in view and
would gladly compromise to retain the nation’s dignity.

But the twenty-first century American political system is
“evidently dysfunctional” and “the so-called conservatives are actually radical
anarchists who seek to further impoverish the majority of Americans to benefit
the wealthiest one percent who have no need of any social safety net, since
they live in their own worlds.”

Mollycoddle then cited Lewis Mumford on the Rabelaisian
culture of the sixteenth-century Country Houses in Europe: “The conditions
which underlie this limited, partial good life are political power and economic
wealth; and in order for that life to develop well, both of these must obtain
in almost limitless quantities. Honest labor cannot achieve such wealth or
command such leisure: it is possible only through privileged exploitation of
the resources and labor of an entire country, for the benefit of a minority.
The ease, the grace, the dignity, the spacious days of this society are
therefore purchased at the price of the toil, the constriction, the ceaseless
economic anxiety of the mass of the population: not only at home but in the
exploited territories abroad. Under all its patent refinements goes a ruthless
monopoly of land and political power. Force and fraud, either remote or recent,
are the twin foundations of Country House existence” (The Condition of Man).

“The reason conservatives rig the American economy,” said
Mollycoddle, “is to recreate that grotesque inequality. It’s a war of princes,
lords, or plutocrats against the planet in general, but particularly against
the majority of mere ordinary mortals.

“So conservatives haven’t a prayer of being anywhere near
right on the issues. Their political views are so many loathsome, decadent
monstrosities or bestial sneers and postures. But they inevitably end up on top
because liberals are pussies, and the reason liberals ‘lack all conviction’ is
precisely because they’re in the right.

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Dateline: NEW YORK—Make no mistake, journalists were fired up, so they drilled down and rolled out a cautionary tale of the
bombshell that landed on a dumpster fire in the middle of a firestorm, after
the grilling of senators who pivoted to whether they’d reached a tipping point
or were just playing politics, not fearing the optics of thinking outside the
box at the crossroads of their last ditch effort, although there was plenty of
blame to go around in this searing indictment of the favourite Washington
parlor game that turned a blind eye on a potent symbol of the game-changer which
donned the mantle of a hotly contested feeding frenzy.

Needless to say, it remains to be seen in the 24-hour news cycle of the
digital age, whether, at first glance, the woefully inadequate, byzantine rules
that burst onto the scene will allow the punditocracy to breathe a sigh of
relief or will force it to probe the powers that be for the
American people, but those rules double-down with strange bedfellows in the
wake of keen observers of tongue-wagging, well-heeled lobbyists who met with an
ignominious end in the final analysis at the end of the day when, for all
intents and purposes, cooler heads prevailed at the inflection point of no
return that was shrouded in secrecy in an ill-advised, much-ballyhooed,
hastily-convened, closely-watched and oft-cited paradigm shift of a broken
system that underscores the object lesson of this Rorschach test.

Be that as it may, this is not your father’s
tectonic shift, if you will, and Christmas came early for skittish donors in that land of contradictions
which ushered in an eye-popping era in a nutshell that, contrary to popular
belief, prevented anyone from acknowledging the new normal in which there are
no face-saving compromises and we all press each other’s hot-button issues
which are the talk of the town, yet a portrait emerges of a grizzly veteran who
endured withering criticism in a dizzying array of wide-ranging interviews in a
nondescript office building, and of the poster child of an unsung hero who was
tapped to rise from obscurity and spark a debate that raised the specter of
hand-wringing partisans on both sides who traded barbs in a war of words and
walked on thin ice in a charm offensive, going forward as creatures of
Washington in a stinging rebuke to the fevered speculation of the proverbial
growing body of evidence that shines a spotlight on a political football, which raises more questions than answers about the tightly knit social fabric.

Saturday, June 24, 2017

Dateline: MOSCOW—In an exclusive interview with Fancypants Magazine,
Vladimir Putin took offense at the allegation that Donald Trump was competent enough
to have colluded with the Russian government in the hacking of the American political
system that helped win Trump the presidency.

“Trump deserves no credit for that Russian triumph,” said
Putin. “Just as the Soviets did the lion’s share of the work in defeating the
Nazis, my army of hackers vanquished American imperialism almost singlehandedly
by securing Trump’s victory, sowing chaos in America that won’t be repaired for
generations.”

According to Putin, Trump is merely his and his oligarchs’
pawn, not a co-conspirator. “Sure, we helped elect Trump by various underhanded
means. And sure, Trump would have applauded our efforts. But Trump is brainless
and has nothing he could deliberately offer us without screwing it up first. We
wouldn’t accept his conscious attempts to pay us back since he’d just bungle
any pro-Russia scheme in his typical ham-handed manner.

“No, we saved Trump from ignominious failure after his near financial
ruin, when no American lenders would touch him, given his tendency to bankrupt
his companies. Through Bayrock Group, Russian oligarchs invested in
his brand and in his family’s ventures at the start of his media career, in
2002. As Eric Trump said, ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all
the funding we need out of Russia.’

“We did this to prop up that psycho-clown,
positioning him as a living WMD to one day blow up the American empire.

“Then we pulled the trigger in 2016, when we
helped to bring down Hillary Clinton by hacking the DNC and manipulating the
egomaniacs and bean-counters in charge of American mass media, supplying them
with fake news they couldn’t resist recirculating.

“Again, we did all this and asked for nothing
in return from Trump. Trump’s being Trump is thanks enough. Being himself, he
couldn’t avoid bringing down the American government from within, once he
became president. He couldn’t help but divide and trash his own country due to
his mental disorders and stupendous incompetence.”

Putin insists on taking all the credit for
Russia’s role in helping to bring Trump to power. Although during the campaign Trump
publicly called for Russia to hack the DNC and retrieve Hillary’s secret emails,
the Russian hackers were busy waging a full-spectrum cyber assault on the American
political system.

“Yes, we heard Trump’s plea for aid against
Hillary Clinton, but Trump deserves no credit for the genius we displayed in
our steering of the American election. He’s a bumbling buffoon that we wanted
to win, because Clinton, the vicious neoliberal, is a hundred times more
threatening to us than Trump, who can be led by the nose just by flattering him
once in a while.”

Putin hopes, though, that Americans continue to
“feed Trump’s ego” with charges of his treachery.

“You have to know what you’re doing to be a co-conspirator,”
Putin said. “You have to be able to put one foot in front of the other without
knocking over a table, slipping and landing on a dog, rolling through a wall
and bringing the whole house down.

“But the more Americans are dazzled by the
conspiracy theories and build up Trump as a criminal mastermind, the more they’ll
stoke his rage and hasten their downfall via his clownish overcompensations.
Naturally, they’ll ignore what I have to say, since who could trust Putin?”

Saturday, June 17, 2017

Recently, at the end of a work day, I parked the company car
at a public parking lot. When I exited the car I happened to notice, just in
front of the left rear wheel, a curled-up baby mouse. I knelt down and saw that
its eyes were closed and it was periodically shivering. I wondered whether I’d
struck the mouse with the car, but there was no sign of blood. Perhaps the
mouse was cowering before the giant vehicle, as I had only nearly crushed it.
More likely the mouse had been abandoned by its mother, since there were no
other mice I could see nearby. I wondered whether there was anything I could do
to help. But I quickly realized I might do more harm than good, since as soon
as I left with the baby, its mother might return to fetch it. Cynically, I reminded myself that
the world is cruel, that untold millions of animals everywhere suffer
unspeakably, that the mouse might carry some disease, that even if I did somehow
rescue it, I’d thereby be depriving some other hungry creature of an easy meal.
In any case, I didn’t have the time during the day and night to care for a baby mouse. Later, I checked
the internet and there are indeed steps that could be taken to rescue an
abandoned mouse, one of which is to drop it off at an animal shelter, which I
didn’t think of at the time. In any case, I left the shivering baby to its
devices, my rationalizations overcoming a pang of anguish I suffered on the
mouse’s behalf. The next day, I returned to the car, expecting to see a tiny corpse
in front of the wheel, but there was none. Had its mother returned? Had a
raccoon gobbled it up during the night? I’d never know.

This raises several issues, but I want to focus on the
nature of that spasm of pity that provided the backdrop for my musings on what
to do as I stared at the helpless rodent. What exactly is sympathy? The least
helpful answer is the rationalist’s, which is that sympathy is in recognition
of the golden rule that we feel for others in need because we fear to
contradict ourselves. Ethics in that case would be a matter of logic. We ought
to help others, because we’re no better than they and we would want to be aided
in return or if the situation were reversed. All of this may be so, except that
it has nothing to do with logic. Instead, it’s based on the implicit social
contract: if I scratch your back, you scratch mine; otherwise, society breaks
down and we all lose out. But the free-rider, who takes that chance, violating
social expectations such as by accepting a favour but failing to return the
good deed, hasn’t acted irrationally by gambling, since the odds are indeed in
his or her favour. Society likely won’t crumble as long as the majority
dutifully respects the social contract while only a minority has the audacity
to be selfish. Indeed, in so far as logic is at issue, unethical behaviour has
the merit of being supported by that probabilistic inference. The free-rider (the
con artist, sociopath, or criminal) who excels at pretending to care about
others or who is protected from the victim’s reprisals, by wealth or social
connections, can have the best of both worlds, including society’s protection from
the elements and the benefits of enriching herself at everyone else’s expense.
Life is short and so a pragmatic decision might well be in favour of
selfishness, in which case the Golden Rule is for dupes who are merely lacking in self-confidence.

Saturday, June 10, 2017

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—After the 2018 U.S. congressional
election, Democrats won back enough seats to bring impeachment proceedings, but
they decided to simplify their case against Donald Trump, citing only the
undeniable fact, as the reason for the urgent need for Trump’s immediate removal
from office, that Trump is “an old man.”

There are hundreds of scandals, crimes, conflicts of
interests, gaffes, inadequacies, or other embarrassments that can be attributed to
Trump’s presidency, but leading Democrats believe they can avoid getting into the
details by reminding everyone that, after all, Trump is just an old man and
thus is obviously unfit for high office.

“There’s something that happens to you when you get old,”
said Senator Al Franken. “You go downhill, as they say. That means your brain
doesn’t work as well as it used to. Why should your brain stay the same when
the rest of your body is clearly deteriorating? I mean, your skin sags and gets
full of wrinkles, you lose muscle mass and bone density.

“You go downhill. At the bottom of that hill is the sort of
old guy ridiculed in The Simpsons. You get to be like Homer’s dad who babbles
incoherently and can’t take care of himself anymore because, you know, he’s
gotten, like, really, really old. That’s what’s happened to Donald Trump: he
got old, far too old to run a country.”

Democrats contend that, although he’s always been a boor,
Trump’s senility is responsible for the outlandish scope of his incompetence. Thus,
there’s no reason “to get into the weeds,” as one Democrat put it. “You just go
with what’s obvious and can’t be denied. Trump is super old and he acts like
it. So he needs to be pushed into retirement.”

Republicans have accused Democrats, in turn, of being
hypocritical, since numerous top Democrats are over seventy years old,
including Bernie Sanders, Barbara Boxer, Pat Leahy, Harry Reid, Carl Levin, and
Dianne Feinstein.

Franken replied that while many Democrats may likewise technically
be far too old to be entrusted with driving a car, let alone with the enormous
responsibilities of holding high political office, they’re “functional old
fogies,” whereas Trump is “off his rocker and off his meds.”

Sociologist Millie Hildebrand credited the PR firm Old Folks
Rule for conspiring to generate the misplaced confidence most people have in
the elderly, which is why, she said, the elderly are often reelected.

“In an election,” Hildebrand said, “voters see the old man
or woman next to the fresh-faced challenger, and the young gun doesn’t stand a
chance because he or she lacks experience. That’s what most voters think; they
go with the greater experience.

“What these voters forget is that the more experience you
have, the older you must be, and after a certain number of years you suddenly
become simply an old man or an old woman. When that happens, it becomes absurd
for others to expect much in the way of competence from you.

“For example, an old politician won’t be able to keep to a
tight schedule, because he or she will be in the bathroom all day and all night.
How are you going to talk tough to dictators on the phone when you’re always
sitting on the toilet?”

Jay Wackadoodle, a political pseudoscientist at the Machiavelli
Institute, offered a different explanation for old people’s success in politics,
pointing to the fact that most American voters are themselves elderly, given
the shockingly-low voter turnout in all U.S. elections over many decades.

“We vote for people like us,” he said. “Bald guys are more
likely to vote for baldies. Blondes vote for blondes, racists vote for racists,
and the elderly vote for the elderly.

“That’s how narcissism works, and we’re self-obsessed
because our materialistic culture drives us to be consumers, first and foremost.
We have to attend to all our needs and wants, and so we have to buy all these
products; we think the world revolves around us. Naturally, then, we presume we
ought to run the country, but because we’re too fat and lazy to do so, we vote
for the next best thing, someone who reminds us of ourselves.”

Sunday, June 4, 2017

In a society dependent on technoscientific progress, the
conflict between faith and reason is liable to be underestimated, due to a
rationalist bias. Faith or intuition will be interpreted as an inferior form of
cognition, the assumption being that knowledge is the ultimate goal of both
science and religion or art. But this rationalist interpretation understates
the magnitude of the conflict.

Reason versus Faith

Reason has mostly been a weapon we’ve deployed against
obstacles in the social and natural environments: we devise hypothetical models
and test them to discover regularities we can exploit. The problem is that the
regularities we find in most of the world are perfectly inhuman. The more we exercised
reason to know what nature is and how it works, the more we had to doubt our
intuitions and our comforting self-image. To take the most glaring example, the
natural world we observed, measured and modeled got larger and older, the more objectively
we examined it. We once thought we were at the center of a universe that
consisted only of our solar system, and that the universe began only “days”
before our arrival in the animal kingdom, just several thousand years ago, as
the biblical Creation myth speculates. Now we know the universe is unimaginably
larger and older than that, consisting of trillions of galaxies and having
begun billions of years ago. And that’s just the observable universe. Natural
reality includes dark energy and matter, which dwarf the universe as we experience
it. Plus, there may be a multiverse which dwarfs even that vaster universe.

In fact, the smart money is on meta-cynicism. Anthropocentrism
has been proven wrong at every turn, and so we can induce that the end of human
knowledge will be some supremely negative form of self-effacing anti-humanism. If
you want to picture the most rational worldview, you should begin by imagining a
monstrous form of objectivity, such as the kind we attribute to the baddies in
science fiction, to the indifferent aliens or to the cold and calculating
robots. This objectivity devours every precious illusion, including all the
life-preserving myths and fairytales that nurture our pride in the human
enterprise. But objectivity doesn’t stop there, as indicated by its postmodern,
deconstructive phase. Reason embarrasses the life-affirming emotions and
intuitions, but it eventually turns on itself so that science and knowledge in
general become de-sentimentalized. Knowledge turns out not to be a tool or a
weapon, after all, but something like a black hole that negates everything in
its path, finally devouring itself. Reason is for understanding the world, but
in standing under or apart from
phenomena, as we learn to detach from them to see them as they really are, we
learn to do the same for ourselves. As a result, the Cartesian divide is undone
and the posthuman vision is of a natural universe of amoral, inhuman processes
that can’t exactly be affirmed as
such, since reason ultimately reveals the world to be indifferent to meaning, truth,
value, and other such anthropocentric illusions. The universe as we objectively present it to ourselves is utterly
inhospitable, a source of horror or anxiety for enlightened creatures.

The honourary saint of Reason is thus the devil, beginning with Prometheus or the serpent of Eden whom the Gnostics revered as
the first skeptic and truth-teller, because he subverted the shaky divine order
as it was naively intuited by the animal slaves that adhered to Yahweh’s
commandments. The serpent warned Adam and Eve that their creator was tricking
them and holding them back, whereas they had the power to investigate and to exploit
natural processes to their advantage. But Reason as symbolized by the nay-saying
serpent turned out to be cursed, since the cost of knowledge is death, the
banishment from the paradise that the world seemed to be when we encountered it
in our innocence as a young species. (We still perceive the world to be a
magical paradise when we’re children and don’t know
better.) The mythical character Satan became the cynic who challenged Yahweh
with doubts as to whether Creation was as magnificent as it seemed, as in the
Book of Job. In the New Testament, the devil is demonized, because Christianity
began as a barbaric, anti-intellectual form of Judaism that obliged everyone
not only to moderate our behaviour but to think as children and to banish
ungodly thoughts, to avoid everlasting punishment. Failing those superhuman
feats, believers merely had to worship Jesus in a cult of personality to be
saved from original sin and from the other flaws of Creation, in a new world to
come at the cataclysmic end of time.

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About the Author

In this blog you'll find my philosophical rants within the undead god. What on earth is the "undead god," you ask, and why do I rant within it? Read on and find out or just look at how the planet and all of nature mindlessly evolve, setting the stage for our existential predicament. In the big picture, who I am doesn't matter at all and when I write here I write mostly with the big picture in mind. But if you're curious about some of my interests, see my blogger profile.